After I leave Jeremy’s grave, I drive into downtown Lake Charles. It could be any small southern city, the road wider than the roads of the Northeast, the buildings lower, with more space between them—but the lake sets it apart. All roads draw to the lake—including the road the funeral parlor was on, which now curves around it and settles at the court-records archives division. Lorilei said goodbye to Jeremy—and his story came here.
When I called ahead from Cambridge, I was told that fifteen file boxes were waiting for me. But I’m still caught off guard when the clerk appears, pushing a dolly loaded with four banker’s boxes. Each box is about three feet long and two feet wide and high. I lift the lid of the box marked #1. A row of packed-in folders, each folder maybe three hundred pages thick. I calculate quickly, my heart sinking and soaring at once. Fifteen boxes—maybe thirty thousand pages? There is so much here. There is so much here.
I understood, of course, what I was told on the phone. Fifteen boxes. But I didn’t understand at all.
“Let me know when you’re ready for the next batch!” the clerk says.
Nothing to do but begin.
In the first box, I find the years after the 1994 trial: Ricky sentenced, Ricky on death row. In the second, his lawyer Clive files briefs to earn Ricky a new trial. Thousands of pages, all focusing on Ricky.
Then suddenly, eight years later, Lorilei appears.
Twenty-Five
June 7, 2002. A pretrial-hearing transcript. Clive and the prosecutor Wayne Frey argue about the white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt Jeremy wore when he died. For ten years it has sat yellowing in an evidence room at the archives division, behind two locked doors that require two separate keys. Will the jury see the T-shirt at the retrial? Clive and the prosecutor Cynthia Killingsworth argue over how much of the prosecution’s evidence—such as the testing on that T-shirt—the defense is entitled to discover. Lucky takes the witness stand and describes finding Jeremy in that T-shirt. Then a technician from the evidence lab describes having cut small holes around stains in the T-shirt to test them for semen.
A man rises from the benches in the back of the courtroom. No one knows him. It’s one thirty in the afternoon. Ricky was there for the beginning of the hearing, but is now back at the correctional center. The lawyers have been gathered in the windowless room since nine thirty, with only a break for lunch. Strangers are rare after ten years on this case. Even rarer are ones dressed as I imagine this man is, in jeans and a work shirt.
“May I address the court?” The man walks to the front and stands in front of Judge Alcide Gray, looking up at Gray in his black robe. The suited lawyers all stare at the man.
“Yeah,” Gray says. He’s bored with this hearing. He’s been bored for hours.
“I’m—I’m King Alexander Jr., and I’m not attired for court today,” he begins. “But I represent the—the—”
His voice falters. This request he’s about to make? He knows it’s unusual. “I represent the mother of the victim, of the crime in the Langley matter. And she wishes to address the court regarding matters that the district attorney has declined to respond to. It has to do with her feelings on the death penalty.”
Frey, the assistant district attorney, must whip his head around long enough to recognize the blond woman seated in the back of the room. This woman he and his office have been forcibly ignoring, not returning her calls, not responding to letters. This seems to be the first anyone takes note of her. She is thirty-eight now. No one’s seen her in eight years. People have been going in and out of the courtroom all morning: cops, detectives, technicians, court personnel. No one has noticed her.
“I thought we were finished with Langley for today, Judge,” says Frey. They were ready to move on to the next case.
Gray cuts him off. “I’ll hear from her.”
Lorilei doesn’t walk to the witness stand. Instead she walks up the center aisle between the benches until she’s standing in front of Gray, looking up at him like a supplicant. He wasn’t the judge on the first trial—that was a white man. Gray’s black, a rare sight in the Louisiana judiciary. Lorilei has never met him before. But he holds her fate in his hands. “I am the mother of Jeremy Guillory,” she says.
“I know who you are.” Gray’s voice is kind.
Lorilei is no longer the young woman in the news photographs: Shorten her hair, scrub off some of the eyeliner and the hairspray, remove the jean jacket she wore when Richard sat with her to talk to the press. The years have thickened her body, but she dressed carefully this morning in a skirt the lady from the Victims Assistance Fund helped her pick out. This plea has to work. “I am here today,” she begins, but the strangeness of what she’s about to say gets to her, too. Her throat goes dry. This will be the most directly Lorilei has ever asked anyone for anything on this case. When her boy went missing the cops did the searching and while they searched only rumors reached her. All she could do was wait. When they found her baby’s body, she let Richard arrange the funeral. When they tried his killer, her name wasn’t on the case. The state’s was. Louisiana v. Ricky Langley. Like that was whom he’d harmed. At the trial the prosecutors told her where to sit, and she sat there. They practiced with her what to say, and she said it. Your own son dies and it becomes the community’s tragedy, as though it’s the system’s tragedy. Public.
But ten years have passed since they told her that her boy was dead. And Lorilei could tell them all how private grief really is, how constant. She could tell them about the quiet. All the noise a six-year-old boy makes and then how loud the silence is when he’s gone. She carried Cole inside her, and every kick she felt in her sternum, every flutter of new life against her heart, must have been an echo of what she’d felt with Jeremy. Her longing for him was sometimes a balm, sometimes an endless ache. Then the early weeks of Cole’s infancy, being grateful for how bone-tired she was because having to just survive took the echo briefly away.
Now Cole’s reaching ages Jeremy never did, and it’s a new kind of pain, the endless accumulation of what-ifs. When she got pregnant a third time she named the baby Rowan and gave Rowan up for adoption. Then one morning two years ago when Jeremy had been gone for eight years, another morning when she’d shaken one child awake for the school bus instead of two, and she was standing in the kitchen packing one school lunch instead of two, her phone rang. On the line was an assistant from Clive’s office, telling her that there would be another trial. Telling her she’d have to relive her son’s loss again.
Now she’s desperate. The lawyers have been talking for hours as if what matters is only whether they kill Ricky. They don’t understand what loss is. Her boy’s gone. Killing his killer won’t change that.
“I am here today, Your Honor, to ask your mercy for Ricky Langley’s life.”
Maybe there’s an intake of breath. Maybe the room is as quiet as a tomb.